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A SMALL FAILURE.
Vavasor at length found he must not continue to visit Hester so often,
while not ready to go further; and that, much as he was in
love--proportionately, that is, to his faculty for loving--he dare not
do. But for the unconventionality of the Raymounts he would have reached
the point long before. He began, therefore, to lessen the number, and
shorten the length of his appearances in Addison Square.
But so doing he became the more aware of the influence she had been
exercising upon him--found that he had come to feel differently about
certain things--that her opinion was a power on his consciousness. He
had nowise begun to change his way; he had but been inoculated, and was
therefore a little infected, with her goodness. In his ignorance he took
the alteration for one of great moral significance, and was wonderfully
pleased with himself. His natural kindness, for instance, towards the
poor and suffering--such at least as were not offensive--was quickened.
He took no additional jot of trouble about them, only gave a more
frequent penny to such as begged of him, and had more than a pennorth of
relief in return. It was a good thing, and rooted in a better, that his
heart should require such relief, but it did not indicate any advanced
stage of goodness, or one inconsistent with profoundest unselfishness.
He prided himself on one occasion that he had walked home to give his
last shilling to a poor woman, whereas in truth he walked home because
he found he had given her his last. Yet there was a little more movement
of the sap of his nature, as even his behavior in the bank would have
testified, had there been any one interested in observing him.
Hester was annoyed to find herself disappointed when he did not appear,
and betook herself to a yet more diligent exercise of her growing
vocation. The question suggested itself whether it might not further her
plans to be associated with a sisterhood, but her family relations made
it undesirable, and she felt that the angle of her calling could ill
consent to be under foreign rule. She began, however, to widen her
sphere a little by going about with a friend belonging to a
sisterhood--not in her own quarter, for she did not wish her special
work to be crossed by any prejudices. There she always went alone, and
seldom entered a house without singing in several of its rooms before
she came away--often having to sing some old song before her audience
would listen to anything new, and finding the old song generally counted
the best thing in her visit--except by the children, to whom she would
frequently tell a fairy tale, singing the little rhymes she made come
into it. She had of course to encounter rudeness, but she set herself to
get used to it, and learn not to resent it but let it pass. One coming
upon her surrounded by a child audience, might have concluded her
insensible of what was owing to herself; but the feeling of what was
owing to her fellows, who had to go such a long unknown way to get back
to the image of God, made her strive to forget herself. It is well that
so many who lightly try this kind of work meet with so little
encouragement; if it had the result they desire, they would be ruined
themselves by it, whatever became of their poor.
Hester's chief difficulty was in getting the kind of song fit for her
purpose; and from it she gained the advantage of reading, or at least
looking into, with more or less of reading as many of the religious
poets recognized in our history as she could lay her hands upon; where
she failed in finding the thing she wanted, she yet often found what was
welcome. She would stop at nearly every book-stall she passed, and
book-stalls were plentiful in her neighborhood, searching for old
hymn-books and collections of poetry, every one of which is sure to have
something the searcher never saw before.
About this time, in connection with a fresh and noble endeavor after
bettering the homes of the poor originated, I had almost said of
course, by a woman, the experiment was in several places made of
gathering small assemblies of the poor in the neighborhood of their own
dwellings, that the ladies in charge of the houses in which they lived
might, with the help of friends, give them an unambitious but honestly
attempted concert. At one of these concerts Hester was invited to
assist, and went gladly, prepared to do her best. It had, however, been
arranged that any of the audience who would like to sing, should be
allowed to make their contributions also to the enjoyment of the
evening; and it soon became evident that the company cared for no
singing but that of their own acquaintance; and they, for their part,
were so bent on singing, and so supported and called for each other,
that it seemed at length the better way to abandon the platform to them.
There was nothing very objectionable in the character of any of the
songs sung--their substance in the main was flaunting sentiment--but the
singing was for the most part atrociously bad, and the resulting
influence hardly what the projectors of the entertainment had had in
view. It might be well that they should enjoy themselves so; it might be
well that they should have provided for them something better than they
could produce; but, to judge from the experiment, it seemed useless to
attempt the combination of the two. Hester, having listened through a
half-hour of their singing, was not a little relieved to learn that she
would not be called upon to fulfil her engagement, and the company of
benefactors went home foiled but not too much disappointed for a good
laugh over their fiasco before they parted. The affair set Hester
thinking; and before morning she was ready with a scheme to which she
begged her mother to gain her father's consent.
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